Networks, such as the Internet, have become an increasingly important part of our everyday lives. Millions of people now access the Internet on a daily basis to shop for goods and services and obtain information of interest.
The web is built on a very simple, but powerful premise. Much of the material on the web is formatted in a general, uniform format called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or the like, and all information requests and responses conform to a similarly standard protocol. When someone accesses a server on the Web, the user's Web browser will send an information request to a Web server. The Web server will respond to the request by transmitting the desired information to the user's computer. There, the user's browser will display the received information on the user's screen.
For example, suppose an individual wishes to purchase a printer via the Internet. The individual accesses the Internet and types in a vendor's uniform resource locator (URL). The individual may then access that vendor's home page to determine whether the vendor has the product that this individual wishes to purchase.
If the individual does not know which vendors sell printers, the individual may access a web site associated with a search engine. The individual enters the generic term “printer” into the search engine to attempt to locate a vendor that sells printers. Using a search engine in this manner to locate individual web sites that offer the desired product or service often results in a list of hundreds or even thousands of “hits,” where each hit may correspond to a web page that relates to the search term.
Once a user decides which web page to visit, the web page is formulated to interest the user. In particular, many web pages allow a user to customize the web pager so that each time the user visits the web page, the customized web page is presented to the user. One of the challenges of online interactions is providing customers or users with consistent online experience while using different channels such as website navigation, email, chat, bulletin boards, discussion forums, chat, and the like. For this uniform presentation, cookies are used.
Cookies are pieces of information generated by a web server and stored in the user's computer, for future access. Cookies are embedded in the http information flowing back and forth between the user's computer and the servers. Cookies allow user-side customization of web information. For example, cookies are used to personalize web search engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide contests, to store shopping lists of items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual shopping mall, and the like.
Essentially, cookies make use of user-specific information transmitted by the web server onto the user's computer so that the information might be available for later access by itself or other servers. Typically, the servers are part of the same domain. In most cases, not only does the storage of personal information into a cookie go unnoticed, so does access to it. Web servers automatically gain access to relevant cookies whenever the user establishes a connection to them, usually in the form of web requests.
There are many reasons a given site would wish to use cookies. These range from the ability to personalize information, help with on-line sales/services, or simply for the purposes of collecting demographic information. Cookies also provide programmers with a quick and convenient means of keeping site content fresh and relevant to the user's interests. The newest servers use cookies to help with back-end interaction as well, which can improve the utility of a site by being able to securely store any personal data that the user has shared with a site to help with quick logins, and the like.
Prior dynamically generated web sites, based on cookie customization, allow users and content providers to customize content. However, while these pages are dynamically generated based on a cookie, or hard coding scenarios in the web page or server. There is no flexibility to change the web page. Further, control of the web page is with the programmer, not a marketing group.